It has often been observed that the 20th century was the most
violent in world history. Wars dominated world affairs on an
unprecedented scale. What has been less often noted, particularly
in the American experience, is the number of wars declared by
national governments on social problems like poverty and drugs--and
the appallingly low victory rate in those wars.

In a very real sense, the 20th century on the domestic front was
an extended cold war between the American federal government and
social problems inherited from the 19th century. In foreign wars,
failure tends to make the citizens angry. In domestic wars, it
tends to make them bored. This civic apathy is often a central
ingredient in the failure of social wars, because social change
requires the active involvement of the citizenry; in this case, the
apathy was unavoidable because of the way the war was fought.

By transforming domestic policy into a climactic struggle
between the national government and every conceivable social ill,
the early Progressives raised the scale of the solution along with
that of the problem. This eliminated civil society from the
picture, made social problems too big for little people, and thus
guaranteed that the war would be impossible to win.

A Hundred Years' War

The year 2009 marks the centennial of the publication of The
Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly. In this book, Croly,
later the founder of The New Republic, warned that the war
would be necessary. Inequality and individualism were rampant, and
America's social fabric was fraying. America's Founders had made
key mistakes in designing its political system, mistakes that were
coming to light under the pressures of the new industrialized
world. The only way to save America's promise was to mobilize its
people through a new, more centralized government that could
coordinate their efforts and provide new national unity.

The premise and purpose of Croly's thought was a paradigm that
would define the Progressive movement philosophically and dominate
much of 20th century politics. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson,
and other contemporaries sought to lead their nation with ideas
based on that paradigm.

President after President since then has sought to fight
American individualism by new offensives in the war. Many different
public service programs have been introduced, each billed as the
final push that would simultaneously meet the national needs and
unleash the energies of the American people in national service:
Bill Clinton called them "nothing less than the American way to
change America."[1]

Yet it seems that new iterations of the war are needed on a
regular basis. One hundred years after Croly's call, the social
problems remain, and each new President's promise to waken a
sleeping giant against the common foe goes unfulfilled.
Progressives continue to criticize inequality, they are joined by
conservatives in criticizing increased individualism, and the
social fabric continues to fray. With each new public service
program, Congress pats itself on the back at having finally
empowered Americans to serve their country as if such a thing had
not been tried a dozen times before. The centennial of Croly's work
saw yet another such program, the Serve America Act, taken straight
out of Croly and the Progressives' paradigm.

James Wilson, Pennsylvania delegate to the constitutional
convention in 1787, wrote:

The more accurately and the more ingeniously men reason, and the
farther they pursue their reasonings, from false principles, the
more numerous and the more inveterate will their inconsistencies,
nay, their absurdities be. One advantage, however, will
result--those absurdities and those inconsistencies will be more
easily traced to their proper source. When the string of a musical
instrument has a fault only in one place, you know immediately how
and where to find and correct it.[2]

If indeed national service programs are the "American way to
change America," then it would seem the American way is an abysmal
failure, insofar as Progressives like Barack Obama criticize
America on precisely the same grounds as did Croly. In fact, Wilson
believed that such programs (which he had seen in Europe) were not
the American way, and with all the other major players in the
American Founding, he spoke out strongly against them.

Far from considering centralized service more compassionate or
even more efficient, Wilson and the other leading American Founders
considered it petty, unsophisticated, and totally inadequate to the
needs of American society. The Founders foresaw the kind of citizen
apathy and passivity that would be created by centralized national
service programs, and they knew that these programs would undercut
the very thing they seek to achieve: an engaged citizenry that
identifies problems and then works to solve those problems in its
communities.

After examining Herbert Croly's paradigm and the European public
service programs that inspired Croly, it will be helpful to look at
the traditional American conception of public service and see why
contemporary public service programs have failed to produce the
widespread public service they were expected to produce.

Herbert Croly and the Progressive Vision of Public
Service

Croly's ideas were so sprawlingly comprehensive, and his
paradigm so far-reaching, that it is inherently unfair to reduce
them to a series of maxims. However, the course of his thought
incorporated a three-part paradigm that has shaped the conversation
on public service ever since, and it is on these three parts that
we will focus our attention: a problem, a goal, and a solution.

First, Croly drew a hard line between private interests and
public and prioritized almost totally the public over the private.
As he saw it, the two primary interests of American life, the
warring factions that defined American society, were the individual
and the body politic.[3] The pursuit of private interest was an
inherently selfish endeavor.

By "private" interest he meant anything short of the national
good. A person who put his own good before the good of the country
was selfish, but so was a person who put first his family,
business, club, city, or state. The point was not that
"selfishness" was wrong--Croly admitted the value of
competition--but that putting small-scale interests ahead of the
national good was harmful to everyone. Thus, what was right and
virtuous had to be what was in the national interest, for reasons
of sheer efficiency if nothing else.

Croly believed this attitude was a natural response to the
increasing scale of the problems America faced. When large
corporations and huge labor unions fought for power across an
interstate battlefield, the only hope for the victory of the many
over the few was in national unity:

No voluntary association of individuals, resourceful and
disinterested though they be, is competent to assume the
responsibility. The problem belongs to the American national
democracy, and its solution must be attempted chiefly by means of
official national action.[4]

Modern stakes were, in fact, so high that the only two options
were official national action and national collapse. State and
local governments had proven themselves utterly ineffective in
dealing with 20th century problems, crisis loomed, and any further
attempt to fight for local interest over the interest of the whole
was corrupt and foolhardy.

These developments were natural given the evolution of American
society. America from its beginning, Croly argued, had been
"committed to the realization of the democratic ideal; and if its
Promise is to be fulfilled, it must be prepared to follow
whithersoever that ideal may lead."[5] The promise of American
life--namely, the collective vision of a better future--meant that
the national system had to change with the times so as to better
equip itself for further progress.

This need for change existed also because the old American way
was responsible for many of the current problems. Americans could
never be truly united to face the modern crisis on the basis of the
traditional American creed, "because that creed itself is
overflowing with inconsistencies and ambiguities."[6] In such a time,
especially in a nation that Croly believed was future-oriented by
nature, the understanding of the American promise had to evolve
past outdated 18th century principles to something that could unite
an entire nation.

"Redemption of the National
Promise"

It was this concept of national unity that provided the vision
for Croly's plan. To be truly American, an idea had to be national.
Croly's public-private distinction meant that to be patriotic, an
American had to commit himself totally to the interest of the
nation as a whole. This meant subordinating one's own needs to the
nation, denying all other causes and even people if they came into
conflict with the national interest.[7] True public service was
entirely altruistic.

Americans, Croly said, had not engaged enough in national
service because they did not realize their responsibility to serve
the nation in such a way; but in the modern world, "the redemption
of the national Promise has become a cause for which the good
American must fight, and the cause for which a man fights is a
cause which he more than ever values."[8] This fight would create a new
solidarity between the warring classes of American society, and
individualistic people and groups that stood in its way must fall
beneath the blade of national fraternity.[9]

As Croly's ideas later began to gain ground in post-Wilsonian
politics, Irving Babbitt wryly observed that such hard-nosed
nationalism "has been summed up in the phrase: 'Be my brother or
I'll kill you.'"[10] But for Croly, Americans and their
leaders could no longer assume that the American promise was
something that was achieved in the working out of their social,
political, and economic relationships. It required conscious
direction.

For Croly, this was not direction toward a stated end, but
direction toward a state of progress. "The future," of course, is
never reached, for as soon as tomorrow becomes today, there is a
new tomorrow to be sought. "For better or worse," he added,
"democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human
perfectibility, and hence from the adoption of measures looking in
the direction of realizing such an aspiration."[11] For Americans to
engage in national service was for them to work selflessly toward
the following of a dream--not a dream merely of individual
prosperity, but of national success.

Such national success would require a new political apparatus
that reflected the needs of the 20th century, not the 18th century.
The powerful forces seeking selfish gain in America had created a
condition the Founders had never anticipated, and such a condition
"demands as a counterpoise a more effective body of national
opinion, and a more powerful organization of the national
interest."[12] If big business and big labor could bully
individuals, the political system needed to be even bigger in order
to counteract them. Croly therefore proposed to overhaul the system
in light of maximum modern efficiency, centralizing control in the
hands of those who could best use it.

"Redemption of the Collective
Responsibility"

In this third concept, the means to progress, Croly envisioned
no longer a bickering pile of political interests representing the
people, but instead a "disinterested" collection of experts. For
the ordinary citizen, helping the widow down the street was
manageable, but helping "the country" was a little abstract, and a
cacophony of interest groups running the government could not make
the idea any more real to him. But if enlightened elites ran the
government--people who knew the American promise and how to pursue
it--they could create national programs to meet national goals.
Then the citizen could participate in those programs and know that
he was helping the country. He still would not see most of the
fruits of his labor, since what he did might not help his immediate
environment, but the experts would see the fruits of the collective
labor and could pick the fruits for the public good. Then the
large-scale economic and social problems could be beaten at a
national level.

Real patriots, Croly said, understood that such a triumph of the
public over the private interest would require a conscious
assertion, and that required conscious direction. Real reformers
"behave as if the American ship of state will hereafter require
careful steering; and a turn or two at the wheel has given them
some idea of the course they must set."[13]

This centralized, professional leadership would actually be more
democratic, Croly insisted, than the way America had been run to
date. It would allow "men of special ability, training, and
eminence a better opportunity to serve the public" and would
"supply them with an administrative machinery which would enable
them to use their abilities to the best public advantage."[14]

In the 18th century, maximum power was given to the people in
their local circumstances (township and state governments); but in
a true democratic vision, maximum power would be given to those
with the most skill and public spirit, who could act not merely on
behalf of their neighbors or special interests but on behalf of the
whole nation. These administrators, free from the petty fickleness
of partisan politics and motivated only by national interests,
could coordinate the public service efforts of the nation. They
would be judged not based on their faithfulness to party lines, but
on the naked efficiency of their results.

The merit of such a plan would be "simply that of putting the
collective power of the group at the service of its ablest
members," who "will never attain to an individual responsibility
commensurate with their powers, until they are enabled to work
efficiently towards the redemption of the collective
responsibility."[15] With the nation's expert leadership
guiding it toward the American promise, the common citizens could
achieve their own promise collectively in coordinated public
service.

For Croly, then, the problem was that America had not yet
adopted national government action to get to his broader goal of
national unity. The solution would be achieved through the creation
of a body of administrative experts who would lead the way to
national unity by establishing national programs in which the
people could participate, thereby devoting themselves to national
goals.

National Service and the Equivalent of War

The "American promise" that Croly had in mind may have been
uniquely American in its ends, but it was heavily European in its
means. Europe had known such national oversight since the early
18th century. Cardinal Richelieu in France had spearheaded such a
centralization of administrative power in the 17th century, and
18th century French kings had followed his example. But the best
example the world had seen, in Croly's view, was the Prussian Otto
von Bismarck's centralization of the German states in the mid-19th
century.

Unlike the French kingdom, which had seen administrative
centralization lead to anarchy, chaos, and finally empire, Prussia
had transformed Germany into a veritable factory of social unity
and military might. The Iron Chancellor's leadership was "a very
striking example" of what leaders could accomplish if they were
willing to take on the full load of national responsibility and use
every available means to accomplish national goals.[16]

By "national responsibility," Croly meant national
administration. Bismarck had used military and social conditions in
Germany to mobilize the German peoples, subordinating their local
concerns to their "particular place in a comprehensive scheme of
national economy" and dividing them among the leadership of
hand-picked experts.[17] Rather than the old conglomeration of
rival interests, German domestic affairs under Bismarck's
leadership were a picture of order and direction. In fact, Croly
said admiringly, it was "the most completely responsible and
representative monarchy in Europe."[18]

Bismarck's domestic achievements, however, were notable only
when considered in the context of his foreign policy. A centralized
state, by itself, gives the average citizen nothing to see, nothing
to cling to, nothing to do. Bismarck knew from the French that
centralization without a cause leaves the people purposeless and
apathetic.

After years of having the affairs of their communities directed
from Paris, Frenchmen had realized that their efforts were no
longer needed and simply stopped trying. Only when the French
Revolution broke out did they stir into action, and when the
revolution was over, they quickly slipped back into oblivion. Croly
described them as "partial economic parasites with very little
personal initiative and energy."[19] At the time, this left
Robespierre with a difficult question: If revolution was the only
thing that kept the people involved, how could he allow the
revolution to stop?[20] So the Reign of Terror began, and the
French leaders, culminating in Napoleon, learned from experience
that a centralized nation-state holds together best when united in
a cause against a great enemy.

But the difficulty of centralization is two-edged, because a
cause great enough to arouse one nation is great enough to lay
waste to others. Bismarck avoided France's mistake and successfully
aroused and united the German states by giving the Germans an Iron
Chancellor and a warlike nationalism.

Peter Viereck records the German demagogue Friedrich Ludwig Jahn
thundering at the time that "Germany needs a war of her own in
order to feel her power; she needs a feud with Frenchdom to develop
her national way of life in all its fullness."[21] Rather than
engage in the intramural jealousies that had kept the German states
in a condition of uneasy peace since the Protestant Reformation,
Bismarck turned their focus outward by pitting them against an
external foe. This enabled him to draw the passions of the Germans
out of their local concerns, awakening their old aggression and
unleashing it against a common enemy (much as would be done again
in 1914 and 1939). War was the food of the nation-state,
centralizing power and churning up a sense of national
community.

"By War and War Only"

Croly knew this. The unification of Germany could have been
achieved "by war and war only,"[22] and with such advantages
offered by the situation, "it is no wonder that she remains the
chief possible disturber of the European peace."[23] It could not have
been just any war, of course. Had Bismarck tried to orchestrate a
war against Japan, little would have been accomplished: The war had
to be against a great rival or threat. The kind of war that
provides the glue for a nation-state is a war for its soul: a war
that provides a field on which it can plant its flag.

It was such a war that Croly proposed. Croly did not want
citizens shut out of politics as they were in France. He wanted
them mobilized as they were in Germany: mobilized for war. In
America's situation, in a pre-Great War era of isolationism, the
war could hardly be military.

Croly recognized the value of war, even going so far as to
suggest that regular war is the best recipe for domestic peace, but
the cause for which he really wanted to mobilize the American
people was the kind William James called in 1906 "the moral
equivalent of war." Like Bismarck, he saw a crucial link between
foreign and domestic policy and knew that the right common enemy
could excite the patriotic passions of Americans, perhaps better
even than the Germans. But since America (practically speaking)
could not have constant wars, Croly wanted to make a peacetime
effort to replicate war's effect on the social order. This, of
course, would achieve the effect not only of arousing the people,
but also of mobilizing them to confront the larger crisis he
believed was occurring.

The common enemy for America was a challenge to its own
soul--not to its material interests, but to the promise of American
life itself. Americans were always enthusiastic about wars when the
wars were perceived as threats to their way of life. They saw that
way of life as definitive of their existence. To them, "the pursuit
of happiness" was itself the American promise, something real
because it was worked out daily in their own self-government.
"Liberty" or "equality" might be abstract by itself, but when the
farmer could participate in political debate and discourse with a
rich merchant in a town meeting, it was concrete and essential. In
this way, local self-government provided a constant outlet for
their patriotic passions that did not require war or cause
instability.

If administration was to be centralized and the American promise
redefined as something that required centralized direction, this
advantage would be negated. With local governments rendered largely
obsolete by the centralization of power under the experts,
Americans would need a new outlet for their passion for defending
the American promise.

What Croly proposed, therefore, was to turn that passion inward.
The new vehicle: wars against the social problems that threatened
the American promise. These wars, spurred by the exhortations of
central planning agencies, would provide the motivation for
Americans to participate in the Bismarckian mobilization. No longer
could Americans lie idle in their selfish local interests; the
nation called them to action. The economy of scale would be applied
to politics, and war would be the capital.

This constant "state of war" was a great boon to centralization
of power in the national government. Like an ideal itself, a
Progressive government must define itself by its opposition to
something. Since its identity is tied to the fighting of a foe, its
success is judged by the scale and incessancy of its actions, and
the need for constant and aggressive action leads to more and more
centralization, particularly in the administrative parts of
government. The early Progressive Presidents took full advantage of
these facts.

"Seeing Crises Where Others Saw Only
Problems"

Like the efforts to arouse America to war against Spain in Cuba,
the efforts to arouse her to social wars saw early success. Woodrow
Wilson was the perfect candidate to fire the first shot. Robert
Nisbet has observed that "Wilson burned and burned as moralist,
seeing crises where others saw only problems," even sending an army
to invade Mexico in response to Pancho Villa's banditry at the
border.[24] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who faced a
true social crisis in the Great Depression, was similarly clear in
his framing of issues. He declared in his first inaugural address,
"I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our
people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common
problems."[25]

Progressive centralization was rapid and common during these
years, and the Depression and two world wars provided emotional
ammunition enough to keep the people's focus. The notion of "We
pulled together and won" spoke to the national mood throughout this
period, both as a response to America's situation and as skillful
national propaganda.

Thankfully, the Progressives did not follow Bismarck's blueprint
in all of this. Only reluctantly did Wilson enter the Great War,
and only reluctantly did Roosevelt become the wartime President
instead of the New Deal President. Fundamentally, they wanted the
mobilization Bismarck achieved without the physical violence.

The quandary this created for the public service question came
from the difference between two things Croly had chosen to
conflate: being aroused for a cause and being aroused for a
country. Croly wanted to make the country itself a cause; but as
Robespierre had discovered, no cause can live long as a substitute
for political relevance. No centralized power had previously
achieved long-term social mobilization without a war, and this
remained true in the American experience: A cause that operated on
a larger-than-human scale did not arouse the kind of permanent
interest that American local politics had previously known.

After a while, the postwar Presidents were forced to acknowledge
the effects of this truth, though not the root problem. At its most
successful, Crolyite Progressivism aroused some amount of sudden
interest, but it was inevitably followed by just as sudden a rise
in apathy as public service was further divorced from normal
everyday life. More commonly, the inherently less dynamic power of
a peacetime call to service met with feeble response from the
populace. In both cases, the intense, cause-specific enthusiasm of
war could not be translated permanently into stable, general
public-spiritedness.

This meant in practice that 20th century Presidents frequently
charged into office with calls to new wars, hoping to arouse an
increasingly disconnected populace into real public-spirited
participation. From the Community Conservation Corps to VISTA
(Volunteers in Service to America) to the Serve America Act,
American leaders proved to each generation on a national stage that
Americans, while privately generous, did not feel a common call to
the kind of national service that Croly said would define the newly
remodeled nation. The emergence of each new program underlined the
fact that the previous one had not done the trick, and each one had
to be replaced or reinvented within a generation.

For Croly, perhaps this would not have been entirely
disappointing: The promise of American life was something to be
constantly sought, not found.[26] But his faith in the value
of the seeking was not validated with either the selflessness or
the stability that he expected. The combination of centralization
and war did not replicate, let alone surpass, the kind of civic
participation common to early America. The nation did not face the
lows of chaos and war experienced by France and Germany, but
neither did it see the kind of central mobilization Croly wanted.
Widespread public service, in the Crolyite sense of constant,
altruistic devotion to "the public" via centralized
coordination--really a reshaping of society in the national
image--never materialized.

The Old American Order

The reasons for this failure began with Croly's desire to
refound American society. By replacing local orders with a national
order, Croly was aware that he was tinkering with what had been the
foundations of the nation. Those foundations, he believed, had
become a shackle, both by their inadequacy and by their promotion
of local self-interest. A revolution was necessary to shake those
chains, and revolutions are inherently unstable.

But Croly's system did not rest, as the Founders' had, on the
bottom of the social order. Its stability was not derived from
local roots at all, but rather from the central planners. Thus, a
revolution at the bottom actually provided the central planners
with the political impetus needed to do their work where, in
another context, it would be harmful. In a very real way, Croly's
envisioned order depended on disorder itself.

Croly claimed that such a course would be what some, at least,
of the Founders would have wished: "The attempt to unite the
Hamiltonian principle of national political responsibility and
efficiency with a frank democratic purpose will give a new meaning
to the Hamiltonian system of political ideas and a new power to
democracy."[27] If that meant riding the crashing waves
of war, then so be it.

Yet the very system Hamilton had a hand in creating did not seem
to react readily to Croly's ideas; at any rate, "the great army of
our people" never showed up to fight for long. Part of the reason
may have been that the design for the society on which Croly sought
to try his plan was radically different from what Croly claimed.
Croly's attempt to co-opt Hamilton in support of his view was
disingenuous, but this was not unusual: The history he narrated
often bore little resemblance to actual events. Hamilton, who
feared the kind of disorder that Croly proposed, was a virulent
critic of revolutionary France and its headlong effort to abandon
traditional order in favor of centralized administration:

The practical development of this pernicious system has been
seen in France. It has served as an engine to subvert all her
ancient institutions, civil and religious, with all the checks that
served to mitigate the rigor of authority; it has hurried her
headlong through a rapid series of dreadful revolutions, which have
laid waste property, made havoc among the arts, overthrown cities,
desolated provinces, unpeopled regions, crimsoned her soil with
blood, and deluged it in crime, poverty, and wretchedness; and all
this as yet for no better purpose than to erect on the ruins of
former things a despotism unlimited and uncontrolled; leaving to a
deluded, an abused, a plundered, a scourged, and an oppressed
people, not even the shadow of liberty to console them for a long
train of substantial misfortunes, of bitter suffering.[28]

While Hamilton's prose might have been more evocative than that
of Washington or Adams, he was not alone in his view of the
instability caused by France's course of action. Madison wrote that
it was the reason, not the passions, of a people that should
regulate the government.[29] The Alien and Sedition Acts of Adams's
Administration bear witness to the widespread fear by more
conservative American leaders that France's excesses would be
echoed in the United States. Even Jefferson, sympathizing more than
most with France's ideals, was eventually forced to regard France
as the dangerous and unstable power it became.

Yet while the American Revolution had often been threatened by
disunity, it had never been threatened by the kind of widespread
social implosion that was experienced by France. Nor did America
respond readily or radically to Croly's ideas, gradually absorbing
many of them at the federal level without the kind of revolutionary
changes seen by France at the local level. The American order was
built upon local stability and consequently did not react to
ideology nearly as quickly or radically as France did.

"The Kind of Self-Government Best Fitted to Their
Needs"

As we have noted, the political power of the kingdom of France
was increasingly centralized over the course of the 17th and 18th
centuries. Where the French village had once operated much as the
American township did in terms of local control, the king
eventually put so many Parisian bureaucrats in charge of local
affairs that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that "the 'common people'
ceased to take any active part in local government and lost all
interest in it."[30] Tocqueville described peasants who
depended upon "a powerful foreigner called the government" so
totally that they no longer took efforts to maintain even their own
streets and communities.[31] France unintentionally achieved the kind
of bottom-up instability that Croly advocated, but unlike in
America, "the people" in France did not exist as a political force
before their revolution.

The result was that by the time of the Revolution, the French
social order had little or no tangible meaning and depended
entirely upon Paris. The king even tried instituting local
assemblies, but the results were catastrophic because the locals
had forgotten generations ago how to govern themselves. The French
peasants had so little control over their own lives that when the
government tottered, they felt their last source of stability
vanish. France would be in a constant state of revolution for
decades, swaying constantly between anarchy and dictatorship.

Croly acknowledged both the social anarchy and the individualism
but said that the problem was not in the revolution at the bottom,
but rather the lack of power at the top. In keeping with his
philosophy, he praised the instability of the French Revolution,
calling it "the route whereby a people, inexperienced in
self-government, have been gradually traveling towards the kind of
self-government best fitted to their needs."[32] The guillotine
and the oceans of blood that were shed were simply part of the
scientific equation. What the French really needed, he suggested,
was more central power rather than less: Had the kings and
dictators had more administrative power, perhaps the violence of
the revolutions could have been guided in a constructive
direction.

In contrast, the Americans in 1787 had a long history of
governing themselves that predated their constitution by hundreds
of years. "What was a passion and a 'taste' in France," Hannah
Arendt observed, "clearly was an experience in America."[33]

The Americans thought it inconceivable that a people that had
existed as France had--living in what Tocqueville called
"quasi-paternal tutelage" with its national identity defined only
by a government--would want to return to such a state. But that is
essentially what Croly proposed: centralized administration
supported by constant war (or "revolution," to use Robespierre's
word). His solution to the French problem was increased
centralization with scientific efficiency, not the local freedom
the 18th century Americans so prized.

Balancing Change with Order

The disconnect between Croly and his ancestors, however, went
deeper than freedom. It was freedom the French revolutionaries
sought (however wildly) to obtain. The reason they could not obtain
it was that they had no remaining social order on which to base it.
Where "the people" to the French could mean nothing more than the
aggregate of individuals living in France, "We the People" in the
American Constitution had a far more complex meaning that
encompassed the political associations of every township and state.
Where Croly sought to base a national regime on constant
revolution, the American leaders, in founding their new national
regime, sought to preserve a pre-existing, stable order that they
hoped need never know revolution.

In other words, both Croly and the Founders sought to balance
change with order. In Croly's mind, the Progressive society would
find its vitality in the constant revolution of causes, and that
vitality would be stabilized by a permanent bureaucracy.

The Framers of the Constitution wanted precisely the reverse of
this dichotomy. For them, stability was in the unchanging cause of
liberty, and change was in the revolution of leaders. They saw in
the French dynamic no dependable social structure in which
Frenchmen could live their lives as public servants. The government
was the only permanent force in their lives. In contrast, the
American order was not an abstract one or a revolution (real or
constructed). Their leaders might (and must) change with each
election, but the political apparatus of their
self-government--civil society--was real, tangible, and
permanent.

Thus, when the French revolted against Louis XVI, society
collapsed because the most important thing holding it together--the
central government--was gone. When the Americans revolted against
George III, only the least relevant part of their government--a
formerly lenient landlord 3,000 miles away--had disappeared. Their
social order, the townships and colonies in which they lived their
lives, both private and public, remained.

Because the roots of the American order were many and deep, the
motivation for public spirit did not depend on national events or
central planning. This is not to say that local institutions let
the American citizen do as he pleased. "On the contrary,"
Tocqueville observed, the Americans "imposed on him more varied
social obligations than elsewhere."[34] The difference was in the
source and nature of the obligations. In a situation that Croly
would have found surprising in 1909, Tocqueville saw local
communities functioning with strong civic participation and little
or no poverty--without the aid of a single central planner.

Some scholars have observed that national election turnout has
been consistently low in America and that this was no different in
Tocqueville's day. What this critique demonstrates, however, is
that in Tocqueville's day the citizens considered the federal
government largely irrelevant to their daily lives; it reveals
nothing about public spirit, because Americans' civic participation
was, in practice, local.

Whatever might be occurring at the national level, whatever
might be true or false in the abstract world of philosophies and
great causes, the citizens' families, neighborhoods, and towns
would always need them. War and social causes might interest them
for a while, but always present was the immediacy of duty to one's
neighbors: what Cicero described as "the conservation of organized
society...rendering to every man his due, and...the faithful
discharge of obligations assumed."[35] In the early 19th century
America that Tocqueville saw, public service was for the average
citizen an endeavor tied to permanence and place--not fleeting
causes and a far-off "foreigner called the government."

From Extended Republic to Centralized
Nation-State

Historically, as Tocqueville's observation about obligations
implies, American society had not been a place where selfishness
predominated. Croly, however, believed it was too individualistic
and had to be replaced. The question was whether this could be done
without leading to the apathy of the French or the wars of the
Germans. Could the European systems be fixed and superimposed on an
American society that had a very different political and social
makeup? Would Americans engage in public service for a nation-state
to greater effect than for a community? Fundamentally, what was it
about the old order that worked so well in fostering public
service, and was Croly right that centralized administration could
do it better?

For Croly, the central flaw in the old way of public service was
its inherent selfishness. He questioned the moral validity of a
political system founded on the individual pursuit of happiness and
urged its rejection in favor of a new nationalistic system. But for
Washington, Adams, and their philosophically diverse compatriots,
public service was part of the pursuit of happiness. The term
"pursuit of happiness" had both a private and a public meaning in
an Aristotelian sense that saw part of human fulfillment in social
involvement. This was why they spoke of civic virtue in the same
breath as civil liberty. Pursuing happiness in the public sense
meant contributing to the health of one's own community--as Arendt
later put it, "having a share in the public business."[36]

It was this concept that shaped the Founders' understanding of
public service. For them, public service was inherently
political, based on responsibilities and not altruism, and anathema
to the kind of bureaucracy Croly envisioned. It was these
distinctions that made them reject the contemporary European
bureaucracies, and it was these distinctions that made Tocqueville,
who believed that bureaucracies were often more efficient, prefer
the Founders' approach to public service.

Croly's basic political paradigm was based on a rigid opposition
between the individual and society. Post-Enlightenment thinkers
like John Stuart Mill had held up the individual as the greatest
good and society as the great evil enslaving him. Croly saw history
as having shifted in the opposite direction: Society, as Rousseau
said, was (or could be) good, but only if the selfish individual
learned that his value "consis[ted] in [his] relation to the whole,
which is the social organization."[37]

What was new about Croly was that not only was the atomistic
individual to be abhorred, but so also were the intermediate
institutions of civil society and local government that prompted
him to veer away from acting in the higher collective good. Instead
of classing those institutions with society as other thinkers had
done, Croly classed them with the individual and condemned them
together for their resistance to nationalism.

It was this paradigm that led him to draw such a hard line
between the private and the public good and to criticize Americans
so harshly for being selfish individualists. In his line of
thought, peacetime Americans had always been individualists because
"private" good meant anything short of the national good. Whether
he spoke of the national good as an expedient response to troubled
times or as the idealistic fulfillment of the American promise, he
believed that it was morally wrong for a citizen to squabble in
petty partisan politics or put local affairs first in such troubled
national circumstances. That citizen should be seeking the "public"
good, engaging in an apolitical breed of "public" service that
would help the nation.

"A Society with Other Beings"

The old way of public service was inherently unacceptable to
Croly because it rejected his individual-against-society paradigm
entirely--not only in the form which said that the nation was the
greatest good, but also in the form which said that the individual
was the greatest good. Thoughtful Americans did not consider the
private and the public to be things that could be totally
separated. The rights and duties of a citizen could not be
conceived of in the abstract--whether the abstract of private
rationality or the abstract of a far off "foreigner called the
government." Even actions of the intellect are typically exercised
in community, as James Wilson observed:

Some operations of the mind may take place in a solitary state:
others, from their very nature, are social; and necessarily suppose
a communication with some other intelligent being. In a state of
absolute solitude, one may apprehend, and judge and reason. But
when he bears or hears testimony; when he gives or receives a
command; when he enters into an engagement by a promise or a
contract; these acts imply necessarily something more than
apprehension, judgment, and reasoning; they imply necessarily a
society with other beings, social as well as intelligent.[38]

Consequently, there could be no such thing as apolitical or
"disinterested" public service. For Wilson and the other Founders,
public service was inherently political because interpersonal
rights and duties could exist only in the context of a community of
souls. To speak of the individual and society, the private and the
public, as if they were mutually exclusive was absurd--and to speak
of them as if they were mutually opposed was destructive to human
society itself.

It was certainly possible to conceive of a blacksmith who never
did anything to help the federal government; the two were so far
from each other that their relationship must by necessity be
understood in the abstract. But it was difficult to conceive of the
same blacksmith as an individual whose interest was entirely
inconsistent with that of his local community. To be so, he would
have to shun the town meetings, his neighbors, his family, the
cleanliness of his shop and his street, and for that matter his
occupation itself.

This is why it was so important for civil society and local
government to be politically relevant: They empowered citizens to
act as social beings instead of as selfish individuals. As Brook
Manville and Josiah Ober contend, "engagement ensures that each
citizen has a genuine and action-based sense of ownership in the
organization."[39] If the blacksmith, having such a stake in
his environment, did not contribute to it, then he could truly be
considered a selfish individualist, and Americans typically held
such recluses in contempt.

"A Concern for the Common
Well-Being"

Such people, however, were rare. Tocqueville noted that
exercises of local liberties "make many citizens put value on the
affection of their neighbors and those close to them" and therefore
"constantly bring men closer to one another, despite the instincts
that separate them, and force them to aid each other."[40]
This was possible only in the small-scale arena. "[S]mall-scale
politics," writes Joshua Mitchell in his analysis of Tocqueville,
"combats the disposition of the Augustinian soul to withdraw into
itself.... Only local politics can revitalize human life in the
interplay of the face-to-face."[41] This interplay therefore
had to occur. Early Americans, contrary to popular opinion, were
not laissez-faire in their economics or their politics, but
they believed that the politics of scale could not match local
politics in drawing the individual to serve his neighbor.

For the average citizen, the pursuit of happiness in the public
sense could not be made in a national context. It was the pursuit
of a meaningful contribution to a local community, the desire to be
rightfully respected, as Adams said, "by the people about him, and
within his knowledge."[42] How could there be such a hard line
between private and public, between the individual and society,
that either could be held up as "good" and the other as "bad?" How
could "public service" be apolitical if it took place in a
community in which citizens had invested "our lives, our fortunes,
and our sacred honor?"

The paradigm later adapted by Croly had appealed to the French
because they had no civil society by the time of the
Revolution--nothing between them as individuals and the national
government. The paradigm gave them something to grasp. But it meant
nothing to the American colonists, for whom civil society--the
bridging of individual and nation--was the means of public service
itself.

Public service in their context could not be based on "public
spiritedness," either in the sense of an abstract selflessness or
in the sense of an abstract nationalism. Richard Vetterli and Gary
Bryner record that in America, public service "was seen as a
concern for the common well-being, not an all-consuming and
unqualified acquiescence to the political regime. It was expected
that people would voluntarily temper their demands and pursuits
enough so that liberty could flourish."[43]

It was this phenomenon that Locke sought to rationalize when he
wrote of the relinquishing of certain "natural" liberties so that
the community (including the individual) might succeed. American
public service found its origin not in the creation of a new
selfless man, but in the voluntary fulfillment of responsibilities
to people with whom one had real political and social
relationships.

Tocqueville did not emphasize those relationships in an effort
to downplay patriotism or loyalty to country. Rather, he sharply
criticized the kind of militant nationalism practiced by France and
later advocated by Croly, which dissolved local institutions,
interests, and loyalties to the benefit of that "unqualified
acquiescence" to the nation-state.

James Madison also warned that such acquiescence led to the kind
of intentional instability that Croly later advocated. In the
large, decentralized republic that he desired, "a rage for paper
money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of
property, for any other improper or wicked project, will be less
apt to pervade the whole body of the Union."[44] This claim in
Federalist No. 10 is most often referenced because of its
argument for the viability of a large republic, but it is equally
significant for the case it makes for decentralization. Madison
maintained that divorcing Americans from their localities, as
France had done, only opened them up to the same kind of apathy and
anarchy that France had seen.

"The First Principle...of Public
Affections"

Edmund Burke, in his critique of the French Revolution, wrote
disapprovingly of its totalizing nationalism. "[T]o love the little
platoon we belong to in society," he maintained, "is the first
principle (the germ as it were) of public affections."[45]
America, as an extended republic, depended even more--not less--on
that first principle.

The reason American social order survived its so-called
revolution when France's did not was that in America, "public"
loyalty was something real that was exercised every day in the
process of local self-government. In the land that Tocqueville saw,
"the native country makes itself felt everywhere," not because each
town was a piece of a larger constructed state, but because the
larger constructed state was a reflection of the organically
developed townships and states that comprised it. Thus, when an
American saw his nation succeed, he rejoiced in that success
because "he believes he recognizes his own work."[46] Unlike the French
system, which led to social and political problems because it had
no human-scaled foundation, American society was based on the
permanent, the small, and the local--on the things that bred
responsibilities.

It was this belief that led Jefferson to reject centralization
as a method of promoting public service. The American town was a
"ward republic," without which no public spirit could be fostered.
He argued that "it is by division and subdivision of duties alone,
that all matters, great and small, can be managed to perfection.
And the whole is cemented by giving to every citizen, personally, a
part in the administration of the public affairs."[47] Foreshadowing
Tocqueville's later observations, he said that citizens involved in
their own local self-government were precisely the people who would
be motivated to patriotism and public service, because they knew
from experience that their stake of ownership in the society was
real.[48] "Public service" was the daily operation
of a functioning community of citizens, and it owed its origin, its
continued motivation, and its purpose to that community.

The Diminished Spirit of the City

It is this understanding that makes plain why the Founders so
unanimously feared administrative centralization. Croly praised the
American pioneer spirit and proposed to turn that spirit inward in
his social crusades. But even the pioneers traveled in small groups
and started towns wherever they settled: In keeping with Madison's
picture of the decentralized republic, they always had a small
scale from which to relate to the large scale.

Croly wanted to eradicate this small scale as the base of
American political operations: He wanted to free the individual
from such "selfish" responsibilities. But if that were to happen,
Jefferson insisted, the American's ability to pioneer would itself
be eradicated. With his ownership in a human-scaled political unit
rendered obsolete, he would be dependent on central elites for his
(artificially created) rights and responsibilities--and would have
lost anything that made the term "public service" meaningful.

The irony is that as Progressivism has evolved, public service
programs have been increasingly sold as exercises in national
compassion. Regardless of whether it is efficient in alleviating
suffering, mass organization cannot be compassionate.
Compassion--sharing the suffering of another--can be given only to
a person, not a generalization or an idea. To turn it into a mass
product cheapens it beyond recognition as the human value to which
modern Progressives appeal; Arendt notes that "it depersonalizes
the sufferers, lump[ing] them together into an aggregate."[49]

National Efficiency vs.
Relationships

Unlike his later adherents, Croly seems to have known this, for
he never argued for his system based on grounds of compassion, but
rather on the more intellectually honest grounds of national
efficiency. Public service for Croly was a matter of meeting
national needs and obligations, not the matter James Wilson saw of
meeting obligations to friends, neighbors, or constituents--to
those with whom one had a relationship that allowed for actual
compassion. Croly was aware of what he was rejecting and that his
proposal was alien to it.

Croly failed to foresee the consequences of eliminating that
political relationship. The modern world is familiar with the
Apathetic Citizen, or the extreme individualist (Tocqueville in
fact coined the latter term). This person may be compassionate at
the personal level but is "not really into politics." It was this
person, taken to the extreme, who developed in France during the
centralization of the 18th century.

It is easy to make the argument that centralized public service
sends the wrong message to citizens, but for Wilson and Jefferson
and others, the problem went deeper than that. The more important
point to them was that in a real, conscious, purposeful sense,
centralized service strips citizens of the link between the reason
for service (responsibilities to those served) and the service
itself. Drawing from Tocqueville, Mitchell warns that "the
consequence is not simply the relocation of the locus of political
power from the local to the national level, but also the
destruction of the site where practical experience may be
nurtured."[50]

Thus, far from combating individualism, the Founders believed
that centralized administration fomented it by rendering useless
the incubator of the political relationships that allowed for both
strong public service and effective self-government. Instead of
Croly's paradigm of individualists and civil society versus the
nation, they saw a paradigm in which local self-government was the
guard against both individualism and nationalism. Disconnected
individuals had nothing to unite them but the state and nothing to
motivate them to service but coercion or theatrics. Local
self-government united the individual with the nation in a way that
benefited the latter and empowered the former, making public
service more common and hence more effective.

"An Active Sentiment of
Attachment"

Alexander Hamilton believed in a strong national government, but
he nonetheless expected that the federal government would be "less
likely to inspire a habitual sense of obligation and an active
sentiment of attachment"[51] than local government, and rightly so. A
person's family, neighborhood, and city--the things that are most
visible and shape his immediate interests and
responsibilities--naturally go first on his priority list. As a
matter of consistent interest, people are far more drawn to the
matters that affect their everyday lives. Thus, public service,
because it should be concerned with everyday life, could not be
done in (or coordinated by) an office building thousands of miles
away. It had to have local meaning, not as a national deed done in
a satellite location, but as a deed rooted in a place and its
people.

An attempt to shift individual responsibility for service from
local relationships to the national identity was, Hamilton
believed, a doomed effort. It might lead to apathy as it had
initially in France, it might lead to chaos as it later did, or it
might lead to a fluctuation between the two (dependent on the
theatrics of war) as it had in Germany, but it could not lead to
stable, consistent service. Even if such a system were more
efficient in meeting short-term material goals, the damage done to
the true foundations of public spirit would be far too high a price
to pay. Each new generation's national "war on poverty" would only
ensure that the following generation, even more apathetic, found
its own war more difficult.

It was perfectly consistent with Croly's paradigm that his ideas
should reach the conclusion they did, but the consistent failure of
Crolyite policies to achieve their goals of national mobilization
is testament to the flaws in the paradigm itself. The old American
way of public service was based on human realities for which
Croly's quest for centralization did not account. In the end, as
Tocqueville wrote:

Administrative centralization is fit only to enervate the
peoples who submit to it, because it constantly tends to diminish
the spirit of the city in them.... It makes the nation triumph on
the day of combat and diminishes its power in the long term. It can
therefore contribute admirably to the passing greatness of one man,
not to the lasting prosperity of a people.[52]

Brian Brown is a former Research
Associate in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at
The Heritage Foundation.

[25]Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "First Inaugural
Address," in Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United
States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1989), at http://www.bartleby.com/
124/pres49.html (May 14, 2009).

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The 20th century transformation of domestic policy in America intoa climactic struggle between the national government and everyconceivable social ill inherited from the 19th century raised thescale of the solution along with that of the problem. Thiseliminated civil society from the picture, made social problems toobig for little people, and thus guaranteed that the war would beimpossible to win.

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